That cookie pop bar thingy made me feel like there is a virus or if I click OK it will give me a virus. all this privacy stuff in my opinion is leaving a trail of breadcrumbs by the vary fact they have to do something to let you know about something.

Plenty of websites have the cookies popup, simply because it's required by EU law to do so (not the popup itself, but informing the users in some way that cookies are being used and for what, and that they consent to such).It's either that, or risking in getting a big fine.

Having that said, the popup itself doesn't leave any "breadcrumbs" per say, but you can easily be tracked by almost anything at all, and the most effective way of tracking users, is having the site owners install/integrate something in common, like these Google and Facebook scripts, or even images towards a common site (pixel tracking).If someone has any true privacy concerns, you can use a proxy and private browsing, and you're good.

I think it's much to do about nothing, just more regulation for government. On foxnews tonight, they had two cell phones, one on airport mode, the other no sim card , (you would have to see it I know nothing about cell phones)

They went around Washington DC, walking, in a car different places and stops. Then they took the phones and used a middleman type of thing that gets the data off the phone, even with the phones not connected the data could track the guy at every stop. The phone with airport mode had even more data they could follow the guy around to ever stop and time or if you are walking or in a car. You would have to see it because I am not explaining very well at all.

but my point is everyone should know they are being tracked with a dang computer hooked up a the internet.

It's not "nothing", the reasoning behind this (which I personally agree with) is for the users to be aware of which data they are giving away, and have control over it.

Does it mean that sites will stop tracking you behind your back? Not necessarily, but they risk a huge fine, and the entities responsible for giving these fines actually take a good portion of that fine for themselves, which only motivates them to thoroughly check the practices of each company.It's thanks to these laws that you can finally permanently delete records of your personal data and you can also extract it to see exactly what they are storing about you.

As for smartphones and whatnot, the data being sent back and forth is not always necessarily for tracking purposes, but for things like push notifications or regular pooling to services to look for information (source: it's one of the things I actually do for a living, I designed a few of these myself), such as app updates, news, notifications, maybe even advertising.

However, yeah, you are tracked constantly regardless of what you do, unless you just turn off the phone, and that's a fact of life and is how companies are able to tell if clients are enjoying their products and what they could enjoy next, as with so much competition, if you don't build the right product you're screwed, so while it's a means to also maximize profit, to be completely fair the clients also win with this by getting products they may actually enjoy and/or find useful, otherwise things like recommended products, or even things users take for granted like the youtube recommended videos, wouldn't work well at all.

It just happens that there are way too many people with heads wrapped in tinfoil and very cynic in general to realize that this tracking is not actually a bad thing in general, both sides generally win.It only becomes a bad thing when this information is sold illegally or if something shady is done with the information, but an instrument for good can always be used for evil, so...and that's why you have things like GDPR so you can get hold of your information and so that companies can be audited to avoid abuse or shady practices.

You are a little bit biased because you work for that industry. But that's ok. I worked for the App industry and I got a different world view about it all.I was the one guy responsible to research user-habits and how to implement this knowledge into a UI to bond the user to the product. But sometimes I went to arty with my designs.

Regarding mobile phones ...loooool ...really? This was already possible with every cellphone pre Smartphone era. If someone wanted to know where you went for the weekend, they could follow your steps via mobile phone tower. Every tower covers a certain area,and when you got close to the next tower your phone registered you to that. It wasn't accurate to a meter but everyone who got access to that date could see in which town or neighbourhood or even street you were.

Feralidragon wrote:otherwise things like recommended products, or even things users take for granted like the youtube recommended videos, wouldn't work well at all.

No it doesn't work well ...I look for anime or games and get suddenly in the autoplay "the 10 worst beauty tips" or "You won't believe how funny that celebrity reacted!" ... just because I clicked month ago on a "the 10 best games from 2000". I deleted all my YT cookies thrice in the meantime. Still no luck, my IP is logged and they still in insist that I have to watch that garbage. If they would make a close button for recommendations you don't want to have that would be really helpful. And on top, they would get a better user data.

papercoffee wrote: No it doesn't work well ...I look for anime or games and get suddenly in the autoplay "the 10 worst beauty tips" or "You won't believe how funny that celebrity reacted!" ... just because I clicked month ago on a "the 10 best games from 2000". I deleted all my YT cookies thrice in the meantime.

papercoffee wrote:You are a little bit biased because you work for that industry. But that's ok. I worked for the App industry and I got a different world view about it all.I was the one guy responsible to research user-habits and how to implement this knowledge into a UI to bond the user to the product. But sometimes I went to arty with my designs.

That makes me curious on how this research was done (not being sarcastic or anything, genuinely curious here).

From what I have seen, there's nothing more efficient than AB testing, where you don't really have to research the user habits, you just test what works and what doesn't, even big boys in the industry use it, like Google, Facebook, etc. Just curious if you also used this, or were mostly things like heatmaps, funnels and such, or if it was mostly "guessing" (which many still do btw, especially those only starting, since they have to start somewhere, which is a legit way of doing it at first).

papercoffee wrote:

Feralidragon wrote:otherwise things like recommended products, or even things users take for granted like the youtube recommended videos, wouldn't work well at all.

No it doesn't work well ...I look for anime or games and get suddenly in the autoplay "the 10 worst beauty tips" or "You won't believe how funny that celebrity reacted!" ... just because I clicked month ago on a "the 10 best games from 2000". I deleted all my YT cookies thrice in the meantime. Still no luck, my IP is logged and they still in insist that I have to watch that garbage. If they would make a close button for recommendations you don't want to have that would be really helpful. And on top, they would get a better user data.

It does work well, if you see certain kinds of videos consistently, but also keep in mind that by "working well", I mean working well for most people, not everyone will enjoy the experience (maybe you are one of those people, which is fine), and this is proven by the sheer amount of comments in YT videos about how they got there through the recommended videos, which I believe to because the same happens with me, sometimes I can spend an hour or 2 seeing videos if I am not careful, so their system works.

But if you keep deleting stuff, they will have less data to go on, plus if you don't want anything recommended based on a video that you saw, you can do 2 things:- suspend the history tracking of youtube temporarily, to see those kinds of videos;- delete the video from history afterwards (I personally do this).

Furthermore, I also mentioned that these are ways to maximize profit, and in youtube this is achieved through ads in videos most of all, so they will also attempt to suggest videos which became somewhat viral or from channels with a big number of subscribers, because they are money-makers from the system's point of view and this cannot be ignored, and this may mean being a bit more aggressive with some videos because you saw 1 of the same kind once, but this works with most because when you see a video about something and enjoy it, chances actually are that you will enjoy another one in the same way.

It's not a perfect system, especially because a recommendation system has to learn things about you, but it generally works, otherwise companies wouldn't invest so much time and money in the development of these.

Red_Fist wrote:You see that is just it, we should all just know they are giving away our data and being tracked, I don't need a warning.

It's not a warning, it's a consent that you're giving.Plus, the whole point of GDPR is to actually give you control over your own data on the web, and it's done in such a way that the tracking process has become harder for companies to handle, because now there are laws in EU which they have to abide to, and given that EU by itself is so significant in the world, companies are just applying the same GDPR rules even in other countries like US, although they didn't need to, but the EU law and change is that significant, and maintaining 2 systems is nearly impossible without doubling or tripling the costs.

papercoffee wrote:You are a little bit biased because you work for that industry. But that's ok. I worked for the App industry and I got a different world view about it all.I was the one guy responsible to research user-habits and how to implement this knowledge into a UI to bond the user to the product. But sometimes I went to arty with my designs.

That makes me curious on how this research was done (not being sarcastic or anything, genuinely curious here).

From what I have seen, there's nothing more efficient than AB testing, where you don't really have to research the user habits, you just test what works and what doesn't, even big boys in the industry use it, like Google, Facebook, etc. Just curious if you also used this, or were mostly things like heatmaps, funnels and such, or if it was mostly "guessing" (which many still do btw, especially those only starting, since they have to start somewhere, which is a legit way of doing it at first).

Nope our company was a newcomer 2010 and so was I ...at the start we made silly stuff like Apps where a roast chicken was spinning in a roasting dish. Or "The incredible Puzzle"

A very simple game with 10 different puzzles ...as you can see nothing specialYou start it and then you get the first puzzle. You could see the complete puzzle before you started... easy, right?Then you had to shake your phone to start the timer and then start puzzling. I who invented this game failed in completing the first one.Nearly no one could solve them all and we didn't got why a puzzle where you even could see the result before hand was so heavy to solve.

Well, it was the pressure you got by seeing the solution before you start AND the shaking. You actively do something different instead of concentrating on the screen. This shaking was like a memory reset, suddenly you couldn't remember how the final puzzle looked like.The conclusion was "never let the user do something else".

I looked into other successful Apps and read psychologic article, for example about the Slotmachine mechanic and why it works in Apps like the iOS mail client.My co-worker liked the new iOS world but I was sceptic from the start... and still am.All this mechanics are there to discipline the user and teach him a favoured behaviour. It works. Push notifications and blinking buttons teach you what's important. You have to pull the "lever" to get the complete message and your attention is needed all the time or else you may miss the next funny message from your "friend". Updates always reminds you that you don't own your phone. You get tracked for advertisings. Algorithms do the searching for you.

People slowly accepted all this because everything worked in that direction. Even the Web got turned into a smartphone friendly environment.No, I'm not happy with all this. But I can't change it.There was a funny cartoon about Facebook with pigs in a barn ..."if you don't have to pay for a service than you are the product."I say, smartphones are even better... You pay for them AND are the product.

@papercoffee: I see, that's very interesting.The attention span of people has also been fairly reduced these past years due to smartphones, like even to see something like a movie, people will miss bits of the movie because of texting or something else happening in their phone (which annoys me to hell, so I don't see movies with anyone anymore). So I would guess that now the challenge would be higher to come up with the mechanics to keep the user engaged and concentrated in whichever game you come up with, unless the game itself is just that good.

Gustavo6046 wrote:YouTube does have a "No interest" button if you click the vertical ellipsis/dots that appear when you mouse over a video:

Feralidragon wrote:So I would guess that now the challenge would be higher to come up with the mechanics to keep the user engaged and concentrated in whichever game you come up with, unless the game itself is just that good.

Or you go the cheap way and use rewards for every bullcrap ... "used a ladder" reward, "killed 5 monsters" reward, "looked through 10 windows" reward...

Feralidragon wrote:

Gustavo6046 wrote:YouTube does have a "No interest" button if you click the vertical ellipsis/dots that appear when you mouse over a video: